Difference between revisions of "Freeside:2.1:Documentation:Administration:Commission"

Latest revision as of 13:49, 10 January 2011

Introduction

Freeside manages commission by applying credits to a customer. Each reseller and employee, has an associated customer record, which will be generally called an associated customer or referring customer as appropriate.

Creating and Linking Associated Customers

A customer must be created for each agent or employee who is to receive commission. After the customer record is created, you need to link it to the correct type.

Agent

Edit the Agent record (Configuration > Resellers > Agents). In the master customer field, enter the customer number. You can also search for company or agent name.

Customer

A referring customer is a standard customer record. No special linking is required.

Employee

Edit the Employee record (Configuration > Employees > Employees). In the customer record field, enter the customer number. You can also search for company or employee name.

Credit Reasons

To track the credits correctly, you are going to want to create a specific credit type and a specific credit reason for tracking commissions and referral credits.

Credit Type

Create a credit type such as "Commissions" or "Commissions and Referrals". (Configuration > Billing > Credit reason types)

Credit Reasons

Create the appropriate credit reasons such as "Employee Commissions" and "Referral Credits". (Configuration > Billing > Credit reasons)

Setting up Commission Events

Commissions are paid based on events. The basic setup is the same with some minor modifications for each commission type.

Basic Event Setup

• Add a new event. (Configuration > Billing > Billing events)
• Give the event a name and set Type to "Package".
• In the "Event Conditions" section in the middle:
  • Leave the "Don't run this event again after it has completed successfully" condition.
  • Remove the "Customer balance" condition by clicking the red X button and confirming the warning..
• In the "Event Action" section at the bottom:
  • Select the correct action to either add the credit based on a customer value or package value.
  • Select the credit reason that you created in the prior step.
  • Enter the desired amount or percentage.

Agents

• In the "Event Action" section, choose "credit the ordering employee a specific amount" or "Credit the referring customer an amount based on the referred package".

Employees

• In the "Event Action" section, choose "credit the agent a specific amount" or "Credit the agent an amount based on the referred package".

Customers

Make the following adjustments:

• In the Event Conditions section, add a "Customer has a referring customer" condition.
• In the actions sections, select the "Credit the referring customer a specific amount" or "Credit the referring customer an amount based on the referred package".

Additional options

Limiting

• To ensure the package is active at the time of the credit, add a "Package status" condition and select "active".
• To ensure the referred customer is active at the time of the credit, add a "Customer status" condition and select "active".
• To limit to new orders, add a "Package is a new order, not a change" condition.
• To limit to once per-customer, add a "Don't run more than once per customer" condition. (Note: this is once per REFERRED customer; a REFERRING customer can still get credit for multiple referrals.)
• To limit to recurring packages (not one-time charges), add a "Package is recurring" condition.
• To limit to (or exclude) certain packages, add a "Package definitions" or "Except package definitions" condition.

Delaying the credit

• To delay the credit until for a certain amount of time from package order, add a "Package age" condition on the setup date.
• To delay the credit until the referred customer has paid a certain amount, add a "Customer total payments (amount)" or "Customer total payments (multiplier of package)" condition.
• To delay the credit until the referred customer has no outstanding balance (optionally, over a particular amount), add a "Customer balance (under)" condition.

Staged credits

• To implement the referral credit in stages (for example, 1/3 after one month, 1/3 after two months, 1/3 after three months), use three separate events with different delays and a portion of the desired credit each.

Reseller virtualizaiton

You may wish to allow your resellers to create and edit their own referral programs. Under Configuration -> Employees -> Employee groups, edit the reseller's group or groups and allow them the "Edit billing events" right (NOT "Edit global billing events"). This allows your resellers to create and edit their own billing events.

Existing data

If you wish to prevent credits from being issued for existing packages setup before a certain date, you need to do something like insert into cust_event ( eventpart, tablenum, _date, status, statustext ) select 54, pkgnum, 1253511094, 'done', 'legacy' from cust_pkg where setup < 1249102800 (where 54 is the eventpart, 1253511094 is the date the event is recorded to have run, and 1249102800 [8/1/2009 Central] is the date before which packages should not be credited).